Charita Goshay: America, the land where we expose despots and espouse fairness

Charita Goshay

Friday

Sep 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 28, 2007 at 3:22 PM

On Monday, Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looked positively gobsmacked when his audience at Columbia University laughed at his declaration that Iran does not have homosexuals.

On Monday, Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looked positively gobsmacked when his audience at Columbia University laughed at his declaration that Iran does not have homosexuals.

It would, however, help to explain his abysmal outfits. President Bush may not be the smartest guy in the room, but even he knows better than to show up for work dressed like a gas-station attendant.

Clearly, Ahmadinejad, whom New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once described as “a twerp in a disco jacket,” could use a gay best friend, preferably one who would stop him from shopping at Aladdin’s Uniform Emporium & Dictator Warehouse.

The notion of a gay-free Iran brings to mind Ahmadinejad’s equally ludicrous denials regarding the Nazi Holocaust. Sure, maybe those 11 million missing people weren’t gassed, shot, starved or incinerated. Maybe they just ... moved.

His appearance at Columbia was reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s Hitleresque buffoon in “The Great Dictator.” By allowing it, America showed the world that one of the surest ways to derail despotism is to expose it.

Home of the brave

If you’ve ever wondered whether a teenager is capable of courage under fire, you need only consider the students who walked the gauntlet at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in the fall of 1957. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High, a pivotal event that changed public education and Washington’s role in civil rights.

Just as fascinating are the images of the mobs who hounded them. Where are those people today, and are they now, finally, ashamed?

Sadly, some public schools are as deprived and segregated today as in 1957.

Certainly, economics is a factor. Those of us who attended integrated schools in the 1960s also grew up in communities with full employment.

Adults back then with just rudimentary skills could acquire good-paying factory jobs that enabled them to support their families. Those jobs, and the stability they offered, are gone.

Not like Ike

Couple poverty with school test scores and the unspoken, primal fears many people still have about race, and you have the perfect storm for resegregation. The Harvard Civil Rights Project’s 2002 report, “Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resgregating School Districts,” noted that although the nation is becoming more racially diverse, its public schools are not.

Among private and faith-based schools, it’s even worse. Even here in Stark County, there are white children who will go through their entire school experience without ever having a minority classmate, scant preparation for a world in which more than half of the people in it are non-Christians of color.

There is word that most of the Republican presidential candidates will skip a debate on Thursday hosted by Black Entertainment Television, thereby blowing a chance to remind the nation that it was a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ordered the desegregation of Central High.

Moderate Republicans like Ike waded into the fight because fairness is such a fundamentally American instinct. How sad that so many of his political descendants have chosen instead to embrace sound-bite ideology over their party’s true legacy.